Honestly, I expected to just have a relaxing long weekend getaway in Whistler with my wonderful wife - we've been there before, and other than Whistler Village's unnerving evocation of the Village from the 1967 cult classic TV series The Prisoner, I really didn't think that there'd be anything blogworthy.
It took us some time to find our AirBnB, the numbering in the rental complex was surprisingly nonlinear. There must have been some kind of rational system, but we never did figure it out. We finally found the right door, keyed in the entry code and made our way upstairs with our luggage.
Karli had found us a pleasant little two-level condo, with an outdoor deck on each level - it says a great deal about life in Whistler that the upstairs deck was considerably larger than the living room area. We unpacked and, while Karli was getting ready for go out for a walk around the village, I casually turned on the TV to see what was available.
I was intrigued to discover that the listings included a Classic Doctor Who channel, which was in the middle of showing The Hand of Fear, a Tom Baker episode originally broadcast in 1976.
A little research revealed that Classic Doctor Who is part of the Britbox offering, which probably shouldn't be a huge surprise - although it's a bit confusing given that the new Doctor Who episodes are on Crave, it seems odd that they'd split them up. It seemed equally odd that it was part of whatever streaming package our host had chosen for his rental guests: with the best will in the world, not a lot of people are going to ditch their weekend plans* in favour of catching up on the full catalogue of the Doctor's classic adventures, in all of their cardboard-tube-and-bubble-wrap** special effects glory.
Although, in a way, it's not completely accurate to talk about the full catalogue of Doctor Who episodes. There were 253 episodes of the series produced between 1963 and 1969, and 97 of them are missing.
This sounds like a tragic mistake in the era of fandom and franchises, but in the 1960s, the standards were completely different. During the 1960s, BBC productions were generally videotaped for broadcast. The tapes were quite expensive, and as such they were erased for reuse shortly after they were shown. In fact, none of the Doctor Who episodes from the 60s have been recovered from videotape, they were all erased.
However, the episodes were also distributed internationally, and due to the differing requirements of global broadcasting, the solution of choice was to use a telecine process to transfer the episodes to film masters, which were then used to create copies for distribution. As time went on and space ran out, many of the original masters were disposed of, but over the years, many of the copies have been recovered from archives and storage lockers all around the planet, and in some cases borrowed from the libraries of private collectors, and used to digitally recreate the episodes.
However, the random nature of the recovery process has resulted in a number of alternative solutions for recreating missing episodes. Animated versions have been created based on amateur audio
recordings of the episodes***, and low resolution NTSC videotapes have been used as guides for colourizing scans of 16mm black and white versions.
To illustrate the degree to which these missing episodes have become valuable items to the serious collector, twelve cans of film were discovered in Nigeria in 2013, including the full six episodes of
The Enemy of the World and five missing chapters of
The Web of Fear from the fifth season of
Doctor Who. Before they could be shipped to the BBC, Episode 3 of
The Web of Fear vanished, presumably stolen and sold to the highest bidder.
Up until now, we've somehow avoided adding Britbox to our otherwise comprehensive collective of streaming services, but now that I'm aware of the classic episodes channel, I'm giving serious consideration to signing up, so as to have a replacement for my treasured but aging selections from the BBC's DVD releases of the Doctor's classic adventures. Hmmm...let's take a look...it IS only $9.99 a month, but would it be worth it...okay, they've got Blake's 7, Red Dwarf, Eleventh Hour, The City & The City, the 1981 version of The Hitch-hikers Guide to the Galaxy and David Tennant in The Quatermass Experiment as well, right, I'm in.
- Sid
* Nor did I. I did watch a couple of chapters while Karli was doing other things, but I would never have suggested that we spend the next three days watching TV, however tempting it might be.
** Yes, we're looking at you, The Ark in Space.
*** I kind of love the random nature of this solution. Imagine that you're a Doctor Who fan in the pre-VHS era, and the only way that you can display your dedication to your beloved Time Lord is by recording audio versions of the show and imagining the visuals.
